A group of British scientists from 11 different U.K. universities - known as UK Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Network - hope to ask the government for 1 million pounds (about $2 million) to fund their alien search team expedition, BBC News reports.
The group held its first formal session on Friday at the annual National Astronomy Meeting at Scotland's University of St Andrews, the first time the group has gathered to discuss a hunt for extraterrestrial life since 2010.
The US SETI Institute has already had some big-name private donors such as William Hewlett, David Packard and Gordon Moore, but the UK SETI Research Network is planning on asking the government for a piece of the science budget.
"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," said Sir Martin Rees, English Astronomer Royal, who plans to be the group's patron. "I'd put it this way: if you were to ask all the people coming out of a science fiction movie whether they'd be happy if some small fraction of the tax revenues from that movie were hypothecated to try to determine if any of what they'd just seen was for real, I'm sure most would say 'yes'."
UK SETI Research Network coordinator Alan Penny estimates that the group will need about 1 million pounds to launch their new mission.
"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out," he told the BBC News. "t's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."
During the group's first meeting, they discussed various ways of finding aliens. Irish astronomer Eamonn Ansbro suggested searching our solar system for alien probes, while speaker Anders Sandberg demonstrated a game theory analysis of a "deadly probes scenario" in which aliens destroy the civilizations they come across.
Past UK SETI research has mainly relied on listening for radio signals from extraterrestrials. While it is uncertain whether or not the British government will give the alien hunting team a slice of its science budget, Jodrell Bank associate director Tim O'Brien said the group could piggyback on other current projects.
"You could do serendipitous searches," O'Brien said to BBC News. "So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you Seti research almost for free."
Jordell Bank has teamed up with a network of seven radio telescopes across the U.K. to research important scientific phenomena such as black holes and star formations.
"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us," said O'Brien.
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